I thought I wasn’t creative. I was wrong.

For 30 years, I believed creativity was for other people. Then something changed.

In school, my art teacher told me I wasn’t very creative. Not very good at art.

I believed them. For years.

It wasn’t just art. That belief seeped into everything. I assumed some people were wired for creativity, and I wasn’t one of them. Creativity was for the designers, the writers, the musicians. The people who could draw, paint, and dream up entire worlds.

I was good at other things. Thinking through problems. Seeing patterns. Understanding people. But creativity belonged to someone else.

At least, that’s what I thought.

Sleeping wires

The brain is funny. It doesn’t forget, but it does go quiet. Parts of it lie dormant, waiting. You spend years believing you’re one kind of person, only to find out you’re carrying around software you never ran.

For 30 years, I didn’t think about making things. Not in the way an artist does. Not in a way that felt like play.

And then something changed.

The unlock

AI tools started creeping into my workflow. First for small things. Prototypes. Quick ideas. They unlocked my writing. But I treated them like assistants, not creative partners.

At some point though, it stopped being about efficiency. It stopped being about productivity.

It started becoming fun.

I was no longer using these tools to get work done, I started making things for the sake of it. Messing around, following ideas, seeing where they led.

And for the first time in my life, I felt creative.

I didn’t suddenly unlock some artistic skill, but the barrier between what was in my head and what I could create had been lowered.

Now I could sketch out a concept without knowing how to draw. I could build an interactive experience without coding. I could generate visuals, manipulate ideas, and shape things that felt like mine, even if I didn’t technically “make” them the way we’re taught creativity works.

I had spent my whole life believing I wasn’t wired for this. Turns out, I was. I just needed the right tools.

What else is sleeping?

It makes me wonder what else we’ve convinced ourselves we’re not good at.

How many people are walking around believing they’re not creative, not analytical, not technical, not something, because they tried once and weren’t good?

Because someone in a position of authority told them so?

What do we lose when we believe other people’s labels about us?

I don’t know if these tools are making me creative or if they’re just revealing what was always there. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

All I know is that for the first time in 30 years, I’m making things. And I love it.